kbahey writes: A local radio channel in Kitchener-Waterloo was able to successfully transmit Bitcoin over radio waves. This makes what is believed to be the first known transmission of the digital currency by a public radio station. A series of beeps were played over the air, and listeners were asked to use an app known as chirp.io to decipher a code produced by the sound. Chris Skory of Rockland County, New York was the winning recipient, and unlocked 0.05 Bitcoin worth about $40. The Bitcoin was donated by Waterloo start-up Tinkercoin and a local Bitcoin enthusiast.

kbahey writes: The North American DrupalCon 2010 was held in San Francisco from 19 to 21 April with about 3,000 attendees. The highlight of the conference was the keynote by David Cole, CIO for the Whitehouse, on Open Source in government. The link has a video of the talk and a panel with the New York State Senate CIO, Andrew Hoppin.

Khalid Baheyeldin writes: "In his New York Times op-ed column, Irish singer Bono, otherwise noted for his humanitarian effortsexpressed dismay at losses music artists incur from internet downloads. He notes that "we know from America's noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China's ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it's perfectly possible to track content". He then goes on to wonder "perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product.""

Khalid Baheyeldin writes: "The CBC is reporting that a so-called "next-generation Canadian voting technology" is making its way on to the American political stage.

The secure electronic voting system based on cryptographic principles was conceived at the University of Ottawa about two years ago. The makers claims that Scantegrity's electronic voting technology is designed to provide end-to-end verifiable voter results.

From the article:

The key problem in automated voter technology is ensuring voter anonymity — by unlinking ballots from citizens' identities — while still providing them a way to check that their ballots have been cast properly.

"Scantegrity gives voters a privacy-preserving receipt," [Essex] says. "It doesn't show other people how you voted, but it does allow you to have a way to check to ensure your vote gets counted."

The concept is similar to hotels that issue confirmation numbers, he says. "You can go online and look up your confirmation number, but it doesn't display your room number."

Another key security feature Scantegrity provides is software independence, Essex says. "This means if an error is made in the software, that mistake can't go through the process undetected. There's a software tool that does a cryptographic self-audit to verify computations."

Scantegrity is designed as an add-on to existing optical scanning voting systems such as Diebold, he says. But the difference is that mathematical formulas are used to generate the randomized confirmation codes issued to voters, and cryptographic principles are used in the software to tabulate and verify the results.

Young said "the proposed bill will cater too heavily to the content industry and not to the engineers and software developers that are going to be most severely impacted by the new laws. The proposed anti-circumvention legislation, he said, is similar to making the use and ownership of screw-drivers and pliers illegal because they can be used to commit crimes such as burglary."

Bob Young is now CEO of on demand publishing Lulu, and owner of the Hamilton Tiger-cats."

Slashdotters may not know who Sandvine is, until they realize that it is the Waterloo, Ontario based company that provides the technology for Comcast and other ISPs the ability to send RST packets for torrents."

Police say the clip didn't lead to any witnesses coming forward, but the extra attention paid to the case because of the use of YouTube likely encouraged the suspect to turn himself in.Hamilton police believe it's the first time law enforcement has used YouTube as a direct investigative tool.Staff Sgt. Jorge Lasso, who made the decision to post the clip online, says the video had registered some 34,000 hits as of Thursday.

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Working in software development and consulting since 1985, starting with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, then mainframes, then an old UNIX hand since 1987.
As a result, I continue to love it to this day, after it morphed into Linux. This is why I am still a command line kind of guy. I use Linux at home exclusively.
Since 2003, a long time contributor and consultant for Drupal [drupal.org], an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) and web application framework.
Co-founded 2bits.com Inc. [2bits.com] which provides LAMP stack performance optimization and consulting, specially for Drupal, but also for WordPress and other PHP applications.
My personal blog can be found at baheyeldin.com [baheyeldin.com].